Pain (2)
Pain is at the steering wheel
swerving left and right for a year now.
It costs a fortune, which I don’t have,
to try to get rid of pain. Maybe a girl
could help or more vodka but I doubt it.
Or a trip to the tropics where the pain would boil away
like the hot cabin last summer where you awoke
and thought you were a corned beef boiling in a pot.
You want to give up, throw in the towel but you
can’t give up because you’re all you have.
Maybe they should put you down like an old dog
like our beloved cocker spaniel Mary who is nearing
the end with paralysis. But unlike me
she’s happy much of the time. On walks
she keeps falling down and I pick her up
to get her started again. She seems to smile.
Neither of us wants to die
when there’s work to be done,
other creatures to be snuck up on,
food to be eaten, a creek to wade,
though I hope to eventually ask God to fully
explain the meaning of Verdun where 300,000 died.
I begin with this frolicsome poem to try to clear the air of any literary particulates, the pollution of pretty sentiment. Pain is really about the struggle of drowning and it has been the primary fact of my life, occasionally removed by a chicken tagine or some other fascinating dinner or say a drink on the veranda. The birds are attentive because one of their own is being cooked, a distant cousin also of the dinosaur.
Pain is all in the details. When you awake with alarm at four A.M. you are not suffering from an abstraction. Since you are unable to remove this fact of life you do what you can to lessen its severity. For me this doesn’t include powerful drugs because I become too loopy to write—my livelihood, important because I’m at least the partial support of eleven people. I recall reading that Faulkner’s family in Mississippi would put him on the train for Hollywood whether or not he wished to go. I don’t mind my life. I never expected to make a living as a writer and the fact that I do startles me. This is mostly true because of the generosity of the French toward my work rather than the citizens of New York.
So I’m not really whining. At least I am not a wee child blasted in the gut in Syria. Those with shingles and the following post-herpetic neuralgia form quite a voting bloc. We don’t like anything or anybody except occasionally our children, dogs, and birds. We vote “NO” in thunder. I recently in desperation had an expensive trip to the Mayo in Arizona but nothing happened in terms of a cure. When I entered, there was a large pool of bloody vomit on the front sidewalk which was off-putting. Someone wasn’t feeling well. I had the perhaps erroneous conviction that the dead are liquefied and piped directly to hell. Why not? Or to the desert as organic fertilizer.
My new plans include a trip to Mexico to see a witch, or bruja, and if this doesn’t work a trip to France where the medical community, unlike America’s, is motivated far less by profit. There’s a paucity of BMWs in France. I have the feeling if shingles produced more profit we would have solved the puzzle by now. There’s the local case of a girl whose mouth was engorged by shingles. Her weight got down to fifty pounds and her parents threw her away by mistake during spring house cleaning. She was found barely alive at the dump and taken in by a pedophiliac foster parent. Not surprisingly Kafka was a lifelong victim of shingles.
My trip to the Phoenix Mayo was not without its pleasures. The famed chef and friend of mine and Mario Batali’s, Chris Bianco, has several restaurants in the city. It’s been my experience that gluttony and public drunkenness help allay pain. We had a quick four pizzas washed down by an equal number of rare vintages. In my opinion the famed La Casaccia is the best of all breakfast fruit juices if a little pricey. The next evening after an afternoon of getting pawed over we had four pastas and then a marvelous Ligurian fish soup and five excellent wines. A prime cause of illness is the failure of people to hydrate during meals. A slight difficulty was finding my room. My ace secretary had gotten me a suite at an immense golf resort full of Republicans dressed in golf fashion like Kansas pimps. I was bilious and sobbing by the time I got to bed to Fox News announcing that God was changing his name to Fred.
The most difficult thing about pain is that it’s so domineering you can’t get out of reach of its relentless body blows. Fly-fishing is diverting enough to lighten the load doubled with being in a beautiful place. Hunting less so, as you can’t forget that you’re trying to blast a supposedly lesser creature into eternity, where it is apparent their speedy attempts at escape they don’t want to go. Visiting foreign countries is also helpful. Your imagination is captivated enough that you’re not feeling the infirmity. Soon enough I hope to go to Arles, France, and simply sit in the empty coliseum built at the time of Julius Caesar. It would be nice to also listen to Arlésien bullfight music without the bullfight. It would also be pleasant if pretty girls would chase one another around the arena but I’ve not yet seen this phenomenon. After the sitting has exhausted me I’ll return to my hotel room which is huge, rare for France. I’m told that both Dominguin and Picasso always stayed in this room. Before lunch Picasso would sit on the balcony and search the village square for girls to invite up for a bite to eat. What a kind fellow! I am not quite short enough to get away with this behavior. Picasso was too short to join our Marines. After a nap and coffee I’ll take a brutally long walk and then have dinner and several bottles of wine at Le Galoubet, and perhaps a nightcap in my room. Early to bed, early to rise. I’m up usually at five A.M., admittedly a stupid habit. I took my Joycean vows as a writer at age fourteen and sixty years later I’m still doing it every day. Is this wrong? No, merely the path of an obsessive. Of course there was the occasional day off for illness or fishing, nothing dire certainly.
There has been the odd suggestion that shingles can be precipitated by psychic exhaustion as long as you had chicken pox as a child, the home of the virus that can hide half a century before it reveals itself like Babe Ruth swinging a bat. Most get over it in a month or two while with an unlucky few, less than 1 percent, it develops into post-herpetic neuralgia and the sores on the flesh retain their vigor.
I haven’t mentioned the largest weapon in the pathetic arsenal against shingles. Not certainly the dozen lotions that were purportedly surefire and I was the gullible boy that spread them wincing with each stroke. The biggest gun is, pure and simple, the brain. Soon after the onset you accept the simplest of facts: the disease is random and your suffering quite meaningless. This is definitely against the texture of the popular culture of our time and its bizarre mavens who try to skew all of the traceries of our lives into something consequential. This is the back wall and the answer is no. Man’s hardest work is hope and belief. Some of us who have done a lot of reading are hard to convince. The meaning of the great suffering of Mandelstam is the incredible poems it produced. What is the exact feeling when you are being escorted to your execution? What was the nature of Anne Frank’s last day on earth? Read her and you can imagine even if you can’t bear her forgiving nature. Remember that you’re pissed off back in Toronto on your sofa.
I can’t tell you why the idea of the logic of birds and fishes diverted me. It’s the whole person led this way and that by its brain. I have spent as many as thirty days in a row in extreme heat, fishing and observing sea life in the Florida Keys with emphasis on the latter, and ninety days in a row trout fishing on a lovely river in northern Michigan. There, landscapes utterly engage the imagination so that pain becomes muted. If you can’t go anywhere you can resort to what Ouspensky and third world shamans called flying or traveling. I have slowly walked the floors of remote oceans and softly flown through the Himalayas and across Africa. You won’t leave this pain behind but you’ll considerably lessen its intensity.
All you want is for the pain to go away when you first pick up one of at least a dozen of supposedly miraculous salves or lotions. Today’s variety is called Swedish Bitters which I’m trying because I’m half Swede and still have a sense of humor. My wife applied it at breakfast. It works a little though under the skin there’s still a kind of pulsing or thumping. It also comes in the form of a mud poultice which I’ve ordered. Having read a lot of silly historical novels in my youth I’ve always wanted my own poultice and then to recover and take up with the general’s winsome daughter. We’ll swim nude in a river and then who knows what will happen? It’s tattooed on her back that she’s 100 percent protein.
Lately I’ve taken to visiting an MD who is also a hypnotist. He has successfully banished the pain albeit temporarily and is trying to teach me how to hypnotize myself. I recall as a teenager wanting to learn this art to get girls. I bought a couple of books through men’s magazines. One brash young woman seated in my 1947 Plymouth said, “What the fuck are you trying to do, Jimmy?” She was one in a long line of failures. My single success was false in that a cousin had also tried to hypnotize her for sex so she was hip to what was going on. She was amused and took off her clothes in a trice. The car was dusty and she had a sneezing fit. She said afterward that she was “horny as a toad” and was just pretending to be in a trance. She did look slightly like a toad but at that age I wasn’t too critical. We relieved each other’s pain for several months until she found a boy who was less “silly” than me.
Surely language is a frivolous way to spend a life. Almost as bad as being a general in Afghanistan. I spent a couple of spring months at age nineteen studying Finnegans Wake and the damage was irreparable. I still hear parts in my dreams. My last birthday I was concerned that I was one hundred and seventy-four. My wife was driven batty by this and finally convinced me to knock off a hundred so I was only the age of the grief-stricken Goethe when he couldn’t convince the eighteen-year-old neighbor girl to marry him. It would be fun, or so he apparently thought. Yummy! Older writers are those about whom it is written “There’s no fool like an old fool.”
Back to pain. It works poorly as a focus for life. You’re certainly not going to write yourself out of it. Most of the doctors I’ve seen, a dozen or so, maximize the aspects of psychic exhaustion as a contributor to the disease. Why am I writing more than a book a year? Beyond my frivolities they advise a sabbatical but then I can’t afford it. The big grants go to the academics. I should have saved more from the salad days but I didn’t. I do know that in the entirety of human history pain is by far the biggest question mark. We humans sit in a beleaguered circle rotating toward our ends knowing that whatever pain we’ve had we’re likely to get more toward the end. We are protein for the gods and are devoured by the wholeness of earth. The specifics are always unthinkable. During a recent illness of my wife I visited her in intensive care for sixty days. The feeling in this ward is one of total incomprehension. My shingles became not much more than raindrops until I went outside and saw pain descending like a thousand firebirds. Once on the way back home to care for the dogs, one an old cripple, I stopped by a huge river, got naked, and threw myself in but then I’m too good a swimmer to go this way. Besides, the dogs would become depressed by their hunger as they do.